Saturday 13 March 2010 17.00 EST
First published on Saturday 13 March 2010 17.00 EST

Ruby Walsh is famous enough, thanks very much. The Irish champion with all the hottest rides at the Cheltenham Festival has no urge to join the personality cult the Racing For Change initiative is pushing to spread the magic outside the sport's heartland.

In the new culture, daredevil jump jockeys would be billboard stars, locked in combat around Cheltenham's dangerous Eden. But Kauto Star's rider would rather the action did the talking.

"I can't see the point. It's waffle," he says. "Popularity will only make racing more popular, won't it? If I sell my soul to the devil and stand in front of every TV camera, that's not going to make more people go racing, is it? Or, I don't think it is. Whether I do or Tony McCoy or Choc [Robert Thornton] or any of the top jockeys do it's not going to make more people come racing. You make more people come racing by the entertainment on the track, not off it.

"Paul Scholes [of Manchester United] is a quiet fellah. He's not sat in front of every camera yet he's a popular footballer. Ryan Moore [a leading English flat jockey] is a shy man and shouldn't be forced in front of cameras to express his point of view. He's a jockey, not a showman.

"I think we do our bit. Some are better talkers than others. Horse racing is as much about horses as jockeys and trainers and we have great horses at the moment. You're expected to do your job, which is riding in races, so it's a bit unfair when you're riding at Cheltenham to be asked to stand outside the weighing room for 20 minutes before the first [to be interviewed] when there's important racing on. It has to have a human quality and that head-to-head element, because it's sport and everyone has their favourite. But I don't know ..."

Not that he is ungrateful to be the star of the carnival. Walsh, 30, just has his game face on. He needs two more winners to surpass Pat Taaffe's record of 25 victories at the Festival, which starts on Tuesday, and is odds-on in three of the four championship races: the Queen Mother Champion Chase (Master Minded), the Gold Cup (Kauto Star) and World Hurdle (Big Buck's). He accompanies Celestial Halo in Tuesday's Champion Hurdle and is sweet on Willie Mullins's Quevega in the David Nicholson Mares' Hurdle on the opening day and Quel Esprit on day two.

No wonder racing's impresarios want to sell Walsh to the uninitiated. He is the soft-handed saddle artist of the winter game: the master of unhurried piloting. But when we meet near his home in Ireland the room is filled with the same demonic intensity his close friend and deadly rival, Tony "AP" McCoy, brings to his domination of National Hunt racing in England.

Walsh versus McCoy is the exquisite subtext of the rematch between Kauto Star and Denman. The score is one apiece in Gold Cups when the two horses have faced each other, so this is The Decider. The agony for Walsh, as stable jockey to the omni-powerful Paul Nicholls yard in Somerset, is that he is obliged to choose between two champions.

"Maybe the lads in the Michael Dickinson yard had it when they had the first five home in the Gold Cup [in 1983]. Maybe one of them had to get off something. Listen, I got it right once, I got it wrong once. We'll know on Friday whether my judgment is right again. But I can't ride them both, that's something I've been resigned to for a quite a few years now."

As he runs through his mounts he recites some star names he will not be riding, and you start to see that this is a jockey who wants the next generation of greats under his dominion as well. "In the novice races I don't ride Dunguib [the opening race dead cert], I don't ride Captain Cee Bee or Sizing Europe or Somersby [Arkle Chase] and I'm not riding Long Run or Punchestowns [RSA Chase]. I've got good rides but I don't have a stand-out novice."

Taaffe's record, though, is surely doomed: "When I think about that, I'm lucky to have good trainers to ride for. Taaffe had Tom Dreaper to ride for and I have Paul Nicholls and Willie Mullins. That made it a bit easier for Taaffe and it makes it a lot easier for me."

Special racehorses exude charisma and an animal sense of the difference between winning and losing. Non-racing people dismiss this as anthropomorphism but the way Walsh tells it Kauto Star will go to the Cheltenham Gold Cup again on Friday itching for a fight.

"The easiest way to explain it is through this year's King George [VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day]," he says. "When we got to the bottom of the back straight and had gone a really good gallop the others were starting to struggle but Kauto was starting to get going. It's about 65 minutes gone in a rugby World Cup final that your outside-half steps up to the plate. You're talking about the last 10 minutes when someone digs it out.

"That's what Kauto does. He has a will to win. When you're riding him at home in schooling you wouldn't have a horse in front of you but if he catches sight of the horse round the bend in front of him he'll always want to go after him."

Rupert "Ruby" Walsh was the Tiger Woods of jump racing, shining from an early age under the tutelage of his father, Ted, a famously combative enforcer from Festivals long past, and trainer of the 2000 Grand National winner, Papillon, who provided Walsh Jr (he was 20) with a winning ride at the first attempt.

But Cheltenham, not Aintree, is his Old Vic. By rights he should be a household name. McCoy has the machine gun quantity but his Irish counterpart has always sat on greater quality. He has won two Grand Nationals, two Gold Cups and four King Georges (on Kauto Star) plus a pair of Queen Mother Champion Chases on Master Minded, who resembled a muscled panther at the recent Paul Nicholls media open day.

"I'm the lucky one," he agrees. "Master Minded is an incredible two-miler. The way he goes about it – he has tremendous pace, he doesn't arch his back, he'll raise his front legs and just go out through the air. That's a big thing with two-mile chasers: Champion Hurdle horses would be the same, they lift in front and don't bend their back. That's what he does with that huge engine. He's an incredible horse, isn't he? Great attitude, too."

In most eras Master Minded's agility and turf-scorching pace would be the main delicacy for National Hunt enthusiasts but this is the showdown Festival for the Kauto Star and Denman camps. These next-door neighbours and summer holiday companions from the Nicholls yard are on a mission to break each other on Cheltenham's anvil. Kauto Star, who won this season's King George by an astounding 36 lengths, is 4-6 favourite to settle the argument with Denman, who unseated McCoy in the Aon Chase last month after winning the Hennessy Gold Cup under a daunting weight.

Walsh discounts the theory that Kauto Star, now 10, is still getting better with age. He is also less trenchant than the form book entitles him to be about his mount's chances of winning a third Gold Cup: "I don't think he has to get any better, though the Denman of two years ago would have you panicking. He had me panicking, anyway.

"Denman on Hennessy day was an exceptional horse. If he turns up on Gold Cup day and runs to that level it'll be a cracking race. I do believe that neither horse can under-perform on the day and beat the other. Denman under-performed last year, Kauto under-performed two years ago, and you had outright victors. This year, if they both turned up in top form I'd be hoping for Kauto to beat Denman, but only hoping. Unless Kauto turns up at his best he won't beat Denman. I rode him on Monday morning and he was in terrific order. He's so well and fresh. He's up for it. It's nice going to Cheltenham knowing that."

The memory of Kauto Star's ebullient destruction of Denman last year over the Gold Cup's extended three and a quarter miles still radiates: "That was the best complete round of jumping he'd ever put in. The last ditch, the ditch up the hill first time, the third-last, second-last: good horses clinch races with good jumps, and in the Gold Cup last year he put other horses under pressure. Good jumpers, like Denman. He had good horses stretched just trying to jump with him."

Racecourse gossip said McCoy and Walsh had agreed to suspend their friendship for the week, or at least abandon their usual arrangement of McCoy providing a bed for his buddy, to maintain some distance, to stop the Gold Cup haunting their breakfast talk. Walsh laughs. "I never stay with him for Cheltenham. Never have, never did. I always stay in Cheltenham itself. And he has family over, and friends. I get turfed out anyway."

Their bond casts rich light on the weighing room brotherhood that National Hunt jockeys have cultivated to protect themselves from the anguish of broken bones and lost rides. But surely it must be problematic for the champion jockeys of Ireland and Britain to be fighting over the same prizes? Walsh looks appalled. "No, we're adults, grown men. Just because it's Cheltenham doesn't mean you can't talk to the man. Jockeys are a tight enough bunch. I don't ride many of his horses, he doesn't ride many of mine, so we're not taking each other's jobs, not running over one another."

But these two are the Ali and Frazier of jump racing, as surely as Kauto Star and Denman express that counterpoint in a golden age of horses and riders. Walsh admits: "Anything he can do I want to do. But there's a respect in jump racing in particular. Racing bites you on the arse quicker than any game in the world. I can win the Champions Chase on Master Minded and go out the next day and give Big Buck's a stone of a ride in the World Hurdle and everyone will want to lynch me.

"You go back into the sanctuary of the weighing room and they'll sit around you and say it's not the end of the world. That's the way jump jockeys are. When it goes wrong you have to stand behind each other and that's what we do. You know how quickly it can go wrong, how easily it can all be over. We've all been injured, we've all had stick, all done the wrong thing. That's why there's none of that snide and slagging. As soon as you start that, true as God, you'll be the next guy to cock it up."

To be a celebrity may be anathema to Walsh, but his brilliance in the saddle reflects the old truism about hard graft always supplementing natural talent. He would deserve whatever extra recognition is deemed acceptable in the modest world of jump jockeyship. "I've never struggled to give racing my life because I love it. You have to put your life and soul into it," he says. "There's no cheap way in."